Letters

In 1942, Mama contrived to “introduce me to” (vide supra) Herr Hermann Hesse, then in his sixties and still living in seclusion in Montagnola, where he was completing Das Glasperlenspiel. Hesse was, in general, celibate, though less than chaste: his conviction that a certain high humour was the mark of transcendent grace, together with his all but total lack of that virtue, had led as much as anything to his breakdown in the 1910’s, his “partially successful” Jungian analysis, and his inability to keep much more than a finger, let us say, in the world. It also made him, off the page and sometimes on, a stupendous bore, though never of the active sort. Mainly he was terrified of people and, like most “major authors” I’ve known, regressive in his intimacies. He came to call me his Knädlchen; I learned to talk the Schwarzwaldish baby talk of the 1890’s; he liked me to dress in lederhosen. Once I persuaded him to swim with me: the lake was icy; Hermann nearly went under; I had to massage him for hours after, to bring back what warmth there was. Neither of us imagined he was still fertile. In an orgy of prideful remorse he drafted the ending of his Meisterwerk (I mean the narrative proper, not the clumsy addenda) and consented to appraise my own manuscripts (I’d managed three short stories in as many years!) whilst I slipped over to Lugano for the abortion. It is his guilt — not for inadvertently getting me with child and permitting the abortion, but for not honestly telling me despite all that my stories were poor stuff (he clenched his teeth and declared them bemerkenswürdig, ganz bemerkenswürdig)—that he projects onto the lad Tito when old Joseph Knecht salubriously and conveniently drowns.

My illusions of Authorhood succumbed with him. The truth — as I see it now with neither false modesty nor frustration — is that my inventive faculty was considerable, my powers of execution slight. I had no gift for storytelling.

Exposition was another matter. As I was so near Coppet, I looked into the life and works of my namesake, and published in 1943, with an English press, a little popular study of Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein. Among its handful of appreciative readers was Sir Jeffrey, who wrote me that his second wife had been killed in the London bombing. He hoped we might remeet should the war ever end and we survive it. It did; we did; he renewed his suit. I put him off through the fall of ’45; when November came and went without a sign from André, I became Lady Amherst.

Our marriage was successful, if scarcely romantic. Both libertine and libertarian, Jeffrey gave great licence to his priapic inclinations and granted similar licence to me, who did not especially wish it. It would not have occurred to him — a thorough aristocrat, but not a snob — to question whether my several pregnancies in our years together were by him or another, so long as our salon, and therefore the stud roster as it were, was of proper quality; he’d have reared any of my children proudly, as he trusted his own by-blows were being reared. In this he was much like the Baron de Staël, and I admired him for it.

Unfortunately, for one reason or another no subsequent pregnancy of mine was brought to term. On our first visit to America, in 1947, I rushed in vain to Castines Hundred (Jeffrey understood it to be a sentimental pilgrimage and discreetly went on ahead to California; I never told him the details, though he’d have been entirely sympathetic). Only a caretaker was there, who had no idea when his employers, “off travelling,” might return. When I rejoined Jeffrey, he was humping a swath through the starlets associated with the English colony in Hollywood, who could not remain perpendicular in the presence of a British gentleman both titled and heterosexual. I myself became close to Maria and Aldous Huxley, the latter then in his early fifties and, alas, as deep into mysticism as had been poor Hermann, at similar cost to his self-irony and general good sense. When I learned he had decided to write no more novels, I lost interest, and soon after aborted spontaneously in a sleeping-car of the Twentieth Century Limited, en route to New York.

There were other connexions, in other years; I have not heart or energy to retell them. We reencountered the Macks in London in ’49, when Jane quite lost her head to Jeffrey as aforementioned, and he indulged her — mainly out of courtesy and good-humoured respect for his own past infatuation. Indeed, he managed to make me feel, bless him, as though the whole mad little episode was a sort of thank-you to Jane for having rejected his earlier attentions and thus led him to me! A remarkable husband; I often miss him.